Minutes of the 26th meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2022

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on Scala Steward, Metals debugger, Scaladex, sbt, GitHub security alerts, SIP meetings, SIP-47 (Clause Interleaving), SIP-49 (Polymorphic Eta-Expansion), TASTy-Query, the Scala website, Scala.js ecosystem, Scala 3 Extension School, Scala 3 Compiler Academy, Google Summer of Code, the Scala Developer Survey, and additional work on open-source maintenance and educational materials.

Details are below and in the Center’s activity report:

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Other business discussed included officer elections, community representatives, Scala 2, Akka licensing, and communication strategy. We also heard about Scala usage at Goldman Sachs and about the results of 47 Degrees’ survey about Scala usage.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Wednesday, October 12, 2022 at 5:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

  • Chris Kipp (chairperson)
    • also board member, representing Lunatech
  • Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
  • Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
  • Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
  • Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Board members:

  • Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
  • Maureen Elsberry, 47 Degrees
  • Graham Griffiths, Goldman Sachs
  • Claire McGinty, Spotify
  • Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
  • Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
  • Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
  • Eugene Yokota, Twitter

(Member companies may send multiple representatives to the meeting, but they share a single vote.)

Guests:

  • Rafa Paradela, 47 Degrees
  • James Townley, Lightbend

Apologies:

  • Haoyi Li, Databricks

Both community-representative seats are temporarily unfilled (see below).

Management report

Chris noted that, as discussed at previous meetings, the time slots for the director’s report and technical report have been shortened to allow more time for discussion.

The management, financial, and governance report was presented by Darja.

She noted that in-person Scala events have resumed and that the Center’s team has started to travel to meetups, conferences, and sprees.

She also highlighted that in September the Center conducted a full day of internal training on community moderation. They hope to offer similar training to community leaders in the future.

The following personnel changes have occurred at the Center:

  • Valérie Pedroni (Community and Communication Coordinator) is leaving.
  • Tomasz Godzik (Software Engineer) is leaving the Center, but will continue working on Scala tooling on staff at VirtusLab.

The Center is currently seeking to re-fill Valérie’s position.

Joining the Center are:

  • Guillaume Martres (Software Engineer) is already known to the community as Martin’s Ph.D student (he finished his degree recently) and a core member of the Scala 3 compiler team. He will do Scala 3 compiler work for the Center for at least the next three months.
  • Quentin Bernet (Software Engineer) is joining the Center for a six-month internship. He will work on the Scala 3 compiler and a new effort to produce a Scala 3 language specification.
  • Jędrzej Rochala (Software Engineer) is employed by VirtusLab and will join the Center under Virtus’s “contributing member” agreement with the Center. His current and future projects include Scastie and Coursier.

The financial report Darja showed a projected negative balance that is expected to return to positive once delayed MOOC funds are received. The Center aims to add at least one new member company soon.

Technical report

Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting.

His remarks were based on the Center’s quarterly activity report:

And the Center’s Q4 roadmap:

The following notes do not repeat the content of the report and roadmap, but only supplement them.

Julien noted that the Q4 roadmap is focused on improving existing things in the Center’s stable projects, rather than starting entirely new efforts. They are prioritizing improvements that will be felt by typical Scala developers in their day-to-day activities.

A board member asked about security vulnerability scanning on GitHub. There was some feedback suggesting possible improvements; has that been acted upon? Julien wasn’t sure off the top of his head, but he’ll follow up after the meeting.

Proposals

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Elections

For chairperson, Chris Kipp put his name forward to continue as chair and was elected unanimously. (Chairs are not expected to serve for longer than one year, but a willing chair is also welcome to serve for longer.)

Also re-elected without any other nominations being made were Martin Odersky (technical advisor) and Seth Tisue (secretary).

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

He said the main news was the release of Scala 2.13.9. He noted it had an unexpected binary compatibility issue that does not affect the standard library but could affect third-party libraries and as a result, 2.13.10 will follow shortly. (And in fact, it was released the day after the meeting.)

He noted that Scala 2.13.9 fixed a CVE in Java serialization of LazyList. He cautioned that even though this particular issue is now fixed, people should treat Java serialization in general as questionable from a security standpoint.

Other business

Community representatives

The Center received nominations from board members and condensed them to a short list of leading names. The Center has begun issuing invitations to the nominees, and it hopes to receive enough “yes” answers to fill at least one of the empty seats by the next meeting, if not both.

Akka license change

James Townley, product manager for Akka at Lightbend, joined the meeting as a guest to answer questions from board members about Akka’s recent switch from the open-source Apache license to the Business Source License.

One outcome of this segment of the meeting was the addition of an entry to Lightbend’s Akka license FAQ emphasizing that “Does this change affect Scala or sbt? No, it does not […]”.

The FAQ gives akka-license@lightbend.com as the contact address for any questions from the community.

Communication strategy for Scala

This was added to the agenda by Chris. He asked about the Center’s approach to publicizing things on LinkedIn versus Twitter and other outlets, including how it coordinates timing and alignment between the different groups involved with Scala.

Several other board members expressed interest in seeing the Center using multiple sites and mediums to get news out. Darja and Julien acknowledged the feedback and said (specifically) that it was not the intent to publish anything exclusively on LinkedIn, going forward, and also (more generally) they’d take the feedback received from the board to heart.

Company overviews

Graham Griffiths presented about Scala usage at Goldman Sachs, especially within his own team, which works on a DSL for financial contracts.

Rafa Paradela, director of engineering at 47 Degrees, joined the meeting as a guest to present the data the company gathered about Scala usage, both internally and in the community, and share some conclusions.

Conclusion

Chris asked whether we might be able to have one advisory board meeting in person in 2023. Darja said yes, we’ll do that at Scala Days if at all possible. (But there aren’t any firm dates yet.)

So we expect the next meeting will be held virtually in January.